Since two days ago, my desktop has been having inexplicable issues, and despite tons of attempted debugging, I've been unable to track them down. I turn in confusion to you guys; hopefully you'll have some suggestions. First, specs:
2x 500GB HDDs, one primary/OS, one storage and backups
2x 2TB HDDs, mirrored (but not RAIDed) as storage and backups
2.4GHz Core 2 Quad CPU
Gigabyte motherboard
4x 2GB = 8GB RAM
650 Watt Antec PSU
2GB Radeon 6950 6-head GPU
Now, symptoms. A few days ago, my computer wouldn't come out of sleep, which it has done a few times before. On reboot, it claimed BIOS settings were lost and "recovered" them. Windows booted fine. The next time I rebooted, though, during the Windows boot process, right after the screen flash indicating (??) that my specific graphics drivers were loaded and activated, the pulsing of the Windows flag suddenly got much, much, much slower. It took another 5-10 minutes to get to the login screen, and although typing my password only lagged slightly, another 10 or 15 minutes to get to the desktop, and after hours the login process of starting up my programs wasn't complete. I was able to replicate the behavior several times. Troubleshooting items that I already tried:
>> Load Failsafe Defaults in BIOS. Same results.
>> Load Optimized Defaults in BIOS. Same results.
>> Tweaked BIOS settings to disable as much automatic CPU scaling and power management as possible. Same results.
>> Tried disconnecting all but the OS HDD. Same results.
>> Tried disconnecting all HDDs and booting a Windows install disk. Install environment displayed same symptoms, very very slow loading, very slow rendering of new windows. Did not actually start install process.
>> Tried moving OS HDD to different SATA controller on my mobo (it has 8 SATA ports). Same results.
>> Tried turning SATA to AHCI mode in BIOS. Windows repeatedly crashed and cycled on normal boot instead of getting super-slow. Turned it back to IDE mode.
>> Tried turning SATA to Native mode. Windows repeatedly said "Image loading failure. Reload image."
>> Tried booting an Ubuntu LiveCD. LiveCD booted at a normal fast rate. All operations seemed fast. Caveats: GParted refused to start. Switching to a terminal and running parted was inexplicably very slow.
Any thoughts would be very helpful. I'm hoping that "replace mobo/CPU/RAM" is not the solution, but it may have to be.
Side note: I smelled a burning smell that then dissipated last night - blown cap? Would that have anything to do with this?
2x 500GB HDDs, one primary/OS, one storage and backups
2x 2TB HDDs, mirrored (but not RAIDed) as storage and backups
2.4GHz Core 2 Quad CPU
Gigabyte motherboard
4x 2GB = 8GB RAM
650 Watt Antec PSU
2GB Radeon 6950 6-head GPU
Now, symptoms. A few days ago, my computer wouldn't come out of sleep, which it has done a few times before. On reboot, it claimed BIOS settings were lost and "recovered" them. Windows booted fine. The next time I rebooted, though, during the Windows boot process, right after the screen flash indicating (??) that my specific graphics drivers were loaded and activated, the pulsing of the Windows flag suddenly got much, much, much slower. It took another 5-10 minutes to get to the login screen, and although typing my password only lagged slightly, another 10 or 15 minutes to get to the desktop, and after hours the login process of starting up my programs wasn't complete. I was able to replicate the behavior several times. Troubleshooting items that I already tried:
>> Load Failsafe Defaults in BIOS. Same results.
>> Load Optimized Defaults in BIOS. Same results.
>> Tweaked BIOS settings to disable as much automatic CPU scaling and power management as possible. Same results.
>> Tried disconnecting all but the OS HDD. Same results.
>> Tried disconnecting all HDDs and booting a Windows install disk. Install environment displayed same symptoms, very very slow loading, very slow rendering of new windows. Did not actually start install process.
>> Tried moving OS HDD to different SATA controller on my mobo (it has 8 SATA ports). Same results.
>> Tried turning SATA to AHCI mode in BIOS. Windows repeatedly crashed and cycled on normal boot instead of getting super-slow. Turned it back to IDE mode.
>> Tried turning SATA to Native mode. Windows repeatedly said "Image loading failure. Reload image."
>> Tried booting an Ubuntu LiveCD. LiveCD booted at a normal fast rate. All operations seemed fast. Caveats: GParted refused to start. Switching to a terminal and running parted was inexplicably very slow.
Any thoughts would be very helpful. I'm hoping that "replace mobo/CPU/RAM" is not the solution, but it may have to be.
Side note: I smelled a burning smell that then dissipated last night - blown cap? Would that have anything to do with this?